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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9027866" data-attributes="member: 6790260">For Jewel of the Desert, they are distinct places within a single plane....but defined by conquest, not by cosmology (well, not directly.) "Hell"--properly, Jannah--is split between devils and demons, who constantly wage war to acquire territory therein.[SPOILER="Doctrinal reasons, you can skip if you don't care that much"]By agreement from all participants the party has spoken with, these factions appeared as a result of the War in Heaven, a conflict which was instantaneous from the perspective of anyone outside, and infinitely long from the perspective of anyone inside. The Servants (essentially, sapient celestial beings) were originally split into two factions: those who upheld the One's divine plan for existence and Their order to never, ever use their powers to coerce mortals; and those who wished to uphold the divine plan but broke that commandment, using their powers, as well as simple force, to make mortals behave as desired. During the course of the war, a third faction arose, from members of both the Servants (loyalists) and the Fallen. This third faction came to enjoy the violence and destruction of the War in Heaven for its own sake, reveling in the feelings, the experiences, the chaos itself.Representatives of all three factions claim that they won the conflict. Devils, whom the Servants call the "Fallen," believe that they won the right to prove that their way of doing things actually fulfills the One's plan, and that they only had to accept the minor inconvenience of actually being self-consistent; they see themselves as being tested and the demons (the "Destroyers") as their mortal enemies. Hence, unless celestial beings interfere with a devil's activities, they are quite content to not fight angels at all, seeing them as simply self-limiting siblings rather than outright enemies. Demons, aka the "Destroyers," believe that they won the right to slake their eternal thirsts and sate their insatiable hungers for as long as they like. They welcome the opposition of both the Servants and the Fallen, because that simply makes the task more interesting, more dangerous, more thrilling.The PCs have only ever met one proper celestial being. The rest seem to be unwilling, or perhaps unable, to interact with the mortal world currently, though they have done so in the past. Specifically, the Safiqi priesthood began, a couple of thousand years ago, from teachings given by Servants, so the mortal church acts as their closest proper representatives. According to Safiqi doctrine, the Servants won the war, albeit at great cost. The One cursed both of the other two factions with what they wanted: the Fallen are now bound by the iron chains of the very law they wish to enforce on others, and the Destroyers are now enslaved to the very desires they wished to stoke, incapable of feeling satisfied.[/SPOILER]This means Jannah is a battleground not just of terrain but of idea and symbol. Devils reshape their part, which is often called "Hell," to be a place of perfectly orderly totalitarian law. A place for everything and everything in its place. The wheels of infernal justice grind relatively quickly, but "corruption"--so long as it does not violate the letter of the law--is rampant. Demons likewise reshape their claimed territory into something fitting them, which I guess you could call "the Abyss" but I doubt they care about naming it. "Sensory overload" would be one description, but also absolute anarchy, "you get what you can take," etc. Powerful demons have servants mostly through intimidation or beguilement, whereas devils respect the chain of command (but certainly will take any justified means to advance.)So the whole of Jannah is...pretty screwed up. Anywhere outside of the most core territories that doesn't see massive, active warfare at least once a decade is either too barren or remote to be worth caring about, or too heavily defended by one side to be worth striking most of the time. Places that change hands frequently may have bizarre mishmashes of cobbled-together buildings and pristine paved streets, or continuous defacement, or half-finished projects piled on top of half-finished projects piled on top of....</blockquote>

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